Throwback

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Drum Beats

“Yes, yes, we journalists love Twitter, even feeling compelled to constantly regurgitate quotes from events, like presidential primary debates, that our prospective audience is already watching, as if we were AP correspondents in the Belgian Congo in a pre-Internet, pre-TV age.”

—James Warren, chief media writer, “For most, it doesn't generate much traffic,” Morning MediaWire, Poynter Institute, April 18, 2016

• Editorial Comment: In-depth and up to the second, all in OMGs and emoticons.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

On the Road



 





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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The Joy of Words

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Seems Simple Enough

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”

—C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), novelist, academic and philosopher, Till We Have Faces, 1956

• Editorial Comment: If that’s true, how to understand politicians?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Sleeping Fleet



 





Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

We miss Jon

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The WORDmeister reassures: Yesterday’s WORD seems to have frightened some loyal victims. We’re not quite done for the season — more blather for a week or two, until classes are over, grades turned in and the whitecoats from St. Mumbles get tired of more campaign crapola. So bear up as best you can. And will the WORD retire after this season? Are you nuts — with a possible Drumpf presidency on the horizon? Jon Stewart can crawl away, but the WORD is made of sterner stuff.
 

Flaming Ants

“The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.”

—Jon Stewart, who abandoned us to the Campaign Year of Insanity, 2010 URL

• Editorial Comment: Of course, if he’d stayed, Jon’s head would already have spectacularly exploded.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Rather Nice



 








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Perfesser of Interesting Stuff

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WORDmeister pre-ramble: This is the last week of my last classes. Last week, I appeared for the last time on the campus of Utah State University, where my wife, Brenda Cooper, started as professors in 1994. As part of my triumphal swan song, I offer this lightly edited plagiarism to my students and colleagues, none of whom I will ever forget. Really.
 

Good Old Professor Who?

“What makes a good journalism professor? newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages. He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy teaching, service and, especially, research so as to publish, not perish. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses shabbily well and talks with charming but opaque academic idiom. Men admire him; women adore him; deans and provosts tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets — but not their salaries — with him. He hates lies and meanness, committee work and sham, but he keeps his temper. He is loyal to his school paper and to what he looks upon as the teaching profession; whether it is a profession, or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. When he dies, a lot of students people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”

  — With apologies to Stanley Walker, newspaperman, New York Herald-Tribune, 1924

• Editorial Comment: Good old whatsisname. Dear old poop.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Cache Valley Sunrise



 








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Bygone Days

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The Family Hour

“Television has brought murder back into the home where it belongs.” 

—Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), filmmaker

• Editorial Comment: But that important family time in front of the tube is gone. Now murder goes straight to Twitter.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Humboldt Still Life



 








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Unstoppable

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Above Average BS

“It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.”

—Matt Taibbi, journalist, “How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable,” Rolling Stone, Feb. 24, 2016

• Editorial Comment: That’s Amurika: The Best & the Brightest.






PeezPix by Ted Pease

Luffenholz



 









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.